Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Image that could not be reproduced properly: Russian service members walk in a Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 5. (Anastasia Barashkova/Reuters)    Opinion The past holds Russia prisoner. This cruelty in war shows how. Yesterday at 7:30 a.m. EDT By Antony Beevor Antony Beevor is the author, most recently, of “Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs.” The deliberate brutality of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has raised a debate about its origins. Were killings such as the 2022 Bucha massacre “casual savagery,” as one commentator put it? Or did they derive from an ancient, underlying assumption in Russia that conspicuous cruelty is a necessary weapon of war? One can never generalize about a whole nation, especially not Russia, with all its different component nationalities and its split between Slavophiles and Westerners. Nor can there be such a thing as a DNA-based national character. At the same time, most countries are influenced, at least subconsciously, by a certain s...

 From Quora Elena Gold  ·  Follow Media analyst  16h What will happen if Ukraine fails to seize the battlefield initiative before winter and the war against Russia continues? \ Ukraine doesn’t need to “seize the battlefield initiative before winter”—there is an opportunity for that, but Ukraine can comfortably stay in defence, while destroying Russian pre-frontal logistics, oil infrastructure, and military manufacturing facilities, and increasing the rate of “deleting” Russian manpower at the front. The Ukrainian campaign of middle strikes on the Russian pre-frontal logistics is working. There are huge issues with fuel in Crimea, because the trucks bringing fuel are specifically targeted by drones—fuel burns well. Russia is losing 500+ trucks a day. To counter that, Russia is painting trucks in weird patterns of black and white (to confuse the AI targeting systems) and began placing armed soldiers every 100 meters by the road. I wouldn’t call it “desperation” like ma...

Moscow has intensified aerial bombing of Ukrainian cities as its battlefield advances have stalled. Today [June 2] at 12:55 p.m.   By Serhii Korolchuk and David L. Stern, The Washington Post Original article contains links -- and photograhs which could not be properly reproduced. KYIV — Russian forces hammered Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities overnight, firing more than 70 missiles and launching 650 attack drones that killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens more, officials said Tuesday. Moscow has intensified its aerial bombing of Ukraine as its battlefield advances have stalled and President Vladimir Putin comes under increasing pressure to find a way out of the war. Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned last week of “consistent, systematic strikes” in Kyiv and encouraged foreign citizens and diplomats to flee the city. Moscow said the attacks were a response to a Ukrainian strike on a student dormitory in Russian-occupied territory, which reportedly killed at least 21 people. Ukr...

Excerpt from a Thomas L. Friedman The New York Times   article (June 2), "Trump has failed as Commander in Chief."  "If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters. ... Not only has Trump choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine , but he is also reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them. ...  Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. They have w...